After following much posted advice from the Net and still failing, it seems there's something beyond my kin of Linux prowess involved in the installation of legacy-grade drivers for the array of both agp and pci graphics cards I've tried to make function on an old HP a210e tower with AM37 MOBO.
. . . Don't know why I keep after this; guess it's the challenge. I have other computers that run Ubuntu 14.04 swimmingly with excellent screen res and no issues.
But with this old HP box I'd like to have a gpu with more ram than the older legacy cards offer (32Mb), that will allow full, max screen res. Mint 17.3 Driver Manager is unable to install ANY clientary drivers; the Driver Manager window is not coded active and the message at the bottom of the list of drivers is: "Keep using current driver" (or similar). The generic-grade, open source driver it selects causes Mint to crash upon reboot, running in the supplementary graphics mode with washed-out display and little in the way of a gui.
Starting out with an Nvidia FX5200 128MB non-generic (big fail) and going through a gamut of successive cards ranging from 512MB back down to 128MB. . . and with the Nvidia Control Center installed, still, no soap.
Does anybody have a clue as to what might work for me in this 32-bit Mint system other than the default 32Mb of (failed) INTEGRATED graphics?
Please toss be a bone, and thanks.

Hi Mike...

Welcome to the forum

What is the 512 MB card exactly?

Regards...

Hi, ardvark71; thanks for your interest in my dilemma.
In answer to your question it's an ATI Radeon Sapphire X1650 PRO AGP with 512MB of RAM -- and is supposedly capable of emulating 4x.
According to published stats the AM37 MOBO's AGP and PCI slots will accept 4x and 8x cards; at least that is what I recall from checking some years back when I was running Windows XP on the old box using the Nvidia FX5200. . . and it worked like a charm. Even featured a terrific gui driver suite that offered every tweek.
. . . No dice in Mint, however. Matter of fact the FX5200 has proven a washout in every Linux build it's been tried with.
She's a no-go, now on the scrap heap but maybe in a future Linux release. . .??
So after the FX5200 floperoo I began buying older cards from ebay -- pci and agp types ranging from 128MB to 256 MB, but no cigar.
The Radeon Sapphire. . . my, er, latest acquisition in 512MB was a sort of pipe dream that failed to manifest. But getting it to function in this 2-bit I mean 32-bit HP machine would be a real joy.
I downloaded all the drivers for my cards from their respective manufacturers (all Nvidia, it seems except for the ATI Sapphire) and presented them to the Linux Software Manager one-by-one after installing the respective cards, ticking the box under Properties for each driver pkg allowing the file to run as a program. (That isn't the issue.)
Then I tried running the install from Terminal, changing the name of the .tar-gz package to n.run, as advised, and still no Christmas turkey.
I closed MDM and entered my user name/login password, then ran the installer.
. . . Came back with a notice every time, something like: Warning -- this driver will disregard the gpu. Continue with installation? Y/n
Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train. And I don't even live in Baton Rouge.
Thanks

Hi...

Your welcome. In terms of the specs, this one is probably your best option. What happened when you tried to run Mint with this card? From what I see here under RV530/RV560, the open source Radeon driver supports it. I doubt the fglrx driver will support this card on newer kernels/releases of Linux. EDIT: The fglrx driver for this card will not work on your version of Mint. From what I see here, Mint 8 is the latest version you could run with the (latest) fglrx driver for your card. So the open source driver is your only option with this card, unless you wanted to use version 8 of Mint, which probably wouldn't work well for you, either. However, if you want to try to get it working using the open source driver, please reinstall the card in your system and then open a terminal and post the entire results of this command...

I know version 173 of the Nvidia driver supports this card. There should have been an option in the Device Manager to install it.

For either card, it shouldn't have been necessary for you to have to install the drivers from the website. The ATI card is supported by the open source Radeon driver by default and the Nvidia card should have been supported by the open source Nouveau driver with an option to install the proprietary Nvidia driver in the Device Manager.

Regards...

Much oblige, arvark71. Got a few things going right now but will get on this ASAP and post results here, if possible.
I say 'if' because the old HP box has no active printer connection and hand copying gives me migraine.
With the gui DOA and Firefox crashing frequently there's no way to use the Net.
Maybe I can use T-bird or something.
We'll see.
M.

I know version 173 of the Nvidia driver supports this card. There should have been an option in the Device Manager to install it.

Nope. V173 was my last-best hope for installing the FX5200 and another flopperoo.
There is no suitable open source driver in Mint 32-bit that works.

In answer to your question, "What happened when you tried to run Mint with this card?" -- It was the same identical thing that has happened in each successive attempt at upgrading the GPU: Cinnamon crashed upon boot and reverted to the alternate mode (barely) remaining in Level 5; very limited options considering the old box only offers 32MB of integrated graphics.

No problem.

Regards...

Hi

How much memory does your system have? If you only have 256 MB's as mentioned here, that's not nearly enough to run most modern distributions of Linux and could explain at least some of your problems.

Regards...

256? Puppy.

17.3 Rosa

• 2GB RAM
• 9GB of disk space (20GB recommended).
• Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution (1024×768 recommended).
• DVD drive or USB port.

Hi...

Look like your link above is broken. Did you mean this page? Look like the minimum memory requirement there says 512 Mb's, what page (or version of Mint) did you see 2 GB's?

Regards...

the nvidia gforce5 card that needs the 173 driver MUST use a old version of Xorg that is 1.15 or 1.14


downgrade Xorg to 1.15
install gcc and the development tools for debian and the kernel headers

then install the 173.run

i have a even OLDER Gforce2 running on ScientificLinux 6.7 ( downgraded Xorg to 1.13 )

Or get another 512MB stick (or two) cheaply. The system appears to take PC2100 DDR-266 (184 pin) and can max out at 1GB.

I'd highly recommend against users, especially less advanced ones, trying to downgrade Xorg. If the OP wants to go this route, I'd suggest installing Xubuntu 14.04.1 It must be 14.04.1 version because newer versions (>= 14.04.2) will have an Xserver that's too new for the nvidia 173 driver. Once 14.04.1 is installed, the nvidia driver can be installed through Ubuntu's driver utility, or if GUI is giving issues, drop to terminal and:
In regards to using Ubuntu/Unity with the FX5200, it should run okay once the nvidia 173 driver is installed. It will probably run slowly on open-source nouveau, because nouveau only reports OpenGL 1.4 on FX5000 cards from what I've seen while the 173 driver reports full OpenGL 2.1. All of that depends on you first getting more RAM, though.

In regards to using Cinnamon on the FX5200 (or any other cards of that vintage), I'd avoid it. Cinnamon can be pretty picky with older GPU's and is best run on cards with OpenGL 3.x

Thank you for this information, I just learned something new.

Regards...

Finally able to get back with the information you requested, ardvark71.
. . . This will be a paste:
suz@suz-D7219K-ABA-A210E ~/Desktop $ sudo ispci -nnk | grep VGA -A 12
sudo: ispci: command not found
suz@suz-D7219K-ABA-A210E ~/Desktop $ sudo lspci -nnk | grep VGA -A 12
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV535 [Radeon X1650 PRO] [1002:71c7] (rev 9e)
Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device [174b:0850]
01:00.1 Display controller [0380]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV535 [Radeon X1650 PRO] (Secondary) [1002:71e7] (rev 9e)
Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device [174b:0851]
suz@suz-D7219K-ABA-A210E ~/Desktop $
-------------------------------
Looks pretty desultory to me.
Come back. . .

no wonder the Nouveau or nvidia driver is not working

those are ATI cards